THE RISE AND RISE OF JANNIK SINNER

The world's number-one tennis player is winning MAJORS and dominating HIS rivals. Now comes the HARD PART.

- MICHAEL SEBASTIAN

The story OF HOW JANNIK SINNER, A GENERATIONAL TALENT, VAULTED FROM being a virtually unknown teen tennis prodigy to a global superstar goes like this: In 2018, at the age of sixteen, the Italian went pro. A year later, while still ranked a lowly 546th in the world, he entered a tournament in Bergamo, Italy, as a wild card—and won the whole thing. Not long after, he competed at the Next Gen ATP Finals against the best players twenty-one years old and under. He won that tournament, too, and burst into the top hundred. Suddenly, everyone in tennis was paying close attention to Sinner. Just a few years later, in 2023, he carried Italy to its first Davis Cup victory since 1976 and became a national hero.

The opportunity was there for Sinner to rise to the top of the sport, with greats like Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic on the downslopes of their careers. He seized it. In January 2024, he resumed his relentless march toward world domination, defeating Djokovic and Daniil Medvedev in back-to-back matches to win the Australian Open, his first victory at a major. The next month, he won the Rotterdam Open. In March, he won the Miami Open.

On June 10, 2024, he became the number-one men’s tennis player in the world.